Orwell’s dream of liberty and equality still has the power to move, writesRobert Manne. But a century after his birth it remains illusory.
Last Wednesday the world celebrated the 100th anniversary of the birth of George Orwell, the man I regard as the greatest political writer of the 20th century.
I first encountered Orwell in the late 1960s. My political identity at that time had been shaped by the shock delivered by the knowledge that, in the decade before I was born, the Nazis had systematically set about the murder of my family and my people. Because of Nazism, my politics were of the left.
It was Orwell who complicated my political identity. For it was he who explained most straightforwardly the implications of the Stalinist catastrophe. A passage from a letter he wrote in 1939 transformed my political outlook.
“The thing that frightens me about the modern intelligentsia,” Orwell wrote, “is their inability to see that human society must be based on human decency . . . there is something wrong with a regime that needs a pyramid of corpses every few years.”
Being an anti-communist did not mean for Orwell the severing of a connection with the left. What he knew was the grotesqueness of any socialism that did not begin with a complete repudiation of the “Soviet myth”. Towards the end of his life Orwell explained: “Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism.”
During the Cold War, because of his anti-communism, Orwell was regarded with deep suspicion by the left. While the right lionised him, they somehow managed not to notice that he was a revolutionary socialist.
Since the end of the Cold War, Orwell’s influence has, if anything, grown. No year passes without new editions of his books or new critical biographies. On the surface this seems odd. Since the Soviet collapse, Orwell’s warnings about totalitarianism have lost their relevance. Virtually no one any longer genuinely believes in socialism, democratic or otherwise. Orwell’s nightmare has lifted. His great hope has faded. Yet of all the political writers of the last century it is he who has endured the best. There is no other writer whose opinions about the present age we would now be more eager to hear.
Why? It is not enough to talk about the lucidity of his mind or the entire absence in him of cant. Some deeper explanation seems required.
Since the French Revolution all Western societies have been haunted by its two great ideals – liberty and equality. In my opinion, of all recent writers no one was more faithful to the spirit of these ideals than George Orwell. It was because of his love of liberty and equality, which shine through every page he wrote, that his influence has managed to outlive the particular nightmares and dreams to which he devoted his life.
Orwell’s serious political thinking began with his involvement on the anti-fascist side in the Spanish Civil War. What Orwell experienced were the brutal attempts by the pro-communist forces to crush their Republican opponents, the Anarchists and Trotskyists.
From this experience all his subsequent political writing flowed. Through the power of his political imagination, Orwell’s fleeting experience of the suppression behind Republican lines in Spain led him to an understanding of the atmosphere of the totalitarian state.
On the basis of the astonishing dishonesty of the ideologues and the press concerning what was happening in Spain, Orwell came to fear a future world from which the ideal of objective truth had vanished and where those who held power were able to control the future through their control over the past. It was in Spain, moreover, that Orwell first saw the peculiar corruption to which those intellectuals who attached themselves to a country or a cause were prone.
For Orwell the essence of totalitarianism was the attack it waged against freedom. After Spain he lived with a permanent dread that the liberal civilisation into which he had been born was gradually being destroyed. This was the source of 1984, the most important warning he wrote about the abuse of absolute state power in the technological age.
But Orwell did not love only liberty. He also loved equality. In Republican Spain he fleetingly experienced a world where “the working class was in the saddle”. This was the kind of world in which Orwell wanted to live. His great Russian Revolution fable, Animal Farm, is essentially the story of the hope for equality cruelly betrayed.
Orwell’s dreams were not complex. He fought throughout his life, as he once put it, for a world where all individuals would have enough to eat and no fear of being unemployed. He did not believe that the superwealthy and the abjectly poor could share a common universe. When he outlined his program for socialism, at its heart was the demand that no one should earn more than 10 times as much as anyone else. Nor was Orwell’s passion for equality restricted to people of the West. He once asked whether it really was too much to try “to raise the standard of living of the whole world” to that of the average Briton of his day.
Equality is nowadays an unfashionable ideal. Yet I rarely discover a student who, after reading Orwell on equality, has failed to be moved or unnerved.
During the Cold War, the anti-communist right embraced Orwell for his defence of classical liberal principles against the totalitarian left. They rarely took seriously his revolutionary socialism and his loathing of privilege, which made him then, and make him still, essentially a man of the left.
In my opinion Orwell’s greatest failure as a writer was his unwillingness to think seriously about the tension between the ideals he loved, liberty and equality. Even in his own age, intelligent liberals argued that in any advanced industrial society the kind of equality of which Orwell dreamed could only be achieved by the creation of the kind of oppressive state he loathed.
On one occasion Orwell wrote a brief review of the most important anti-socialist manifesto of the 20th century, Hayek’s Road to Serfdom. Orwell was honest enough to admit the truth of Hayek’s warning that a “collectivist” economy gives to a “tyrannical minority” terrible potential power. But because he believed that the evils of laissez faire capitalism were even worse, all he could offer as an answer to Hayek was a politics where “the concept of right and wrong” had been restored. This is astonishingly lame. In the end, because Orwell’s democratic socialism was founded on ethics rather than economics, it proved utterly vulnerable to the power of the neo-liberal critique.
Robert Manne is professor of politics at La Trobe University.
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